


a devil set aside (for me)

by words-writ-in-starlight (Gunmetal_Crown)



Series: passive aggressive kencyrath AU collection [2]
Category: Chronicles of the Kencyrath - P. C. Hodgell, Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Gen, Good Lord I Should Be Asleep Right Now, Good Omens AU, I WILL Self-Generate All The Content I Wish To See In The World
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-12
Updated: 2019-06-12
Packaged: 2020-05-01 21:59:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19186246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gunmetal_Crown/pseuds/words-writ-in-starlight
Summary: The year is 6000 AC, give or take a few dozen months, when Jame is handed a baby.Or, the start of the Apocalypse, featuring an angel, a demon, and a misplaced Antichrist.





	a devil set aside (for me)

**Author's Note:**

> Hey listen I wrote this in like...2 hours? While VERY sleepy. 
> 
> The title is from Bohemian Rhapsody.

The year is 6000 AC1, give or take a few dozen months, when Jame is handed a baby.

This is not, as such things go, particularly common practice.  Something about Jame makes people reluctant to hand her babies.  It’s probably her clear and obvious alarm when handed a baby, or any other human too small to feasibly navigate itself home without her guidance.  It may also be the too-silver shine of her eyes over her sunglasses, and the cat-sharp points of her canines when she smiles.  Regardless, Jame has taken great pains to make sure she doesn’t look like someone who was cosmically _meant_ to be handed babies2.

“Hail Satan.  You’re late, Jamethiel,” Keral observes, and Jame makes a vague gesture—at the graveyard, at the half-cloudy night sky, at her pristine white car—as if to explain.

“Hail Satan, and stuff, sure.  Ran into traffic,” she says.  Keral doesn’t often lower himself to dallying on Earth, and last Jame checked he didn’t totally understand what a car _was_ , although there’s a certain intuitive grasp on things like _traffic_ and _hot coals_ and _slow torture_ among demons.  He seems to have a broad grasp of what she means.  Bane, leaning against a gravestone and smiling his too-wide smile, seems to have a much clearer grasp, but then Bane likes Earth3.  “So.  What’s, uh, happening?”

“Present for you,” Bane says, holding up an honest-to-Hell basket, a tidily woven job that looks like something Jame might have seen in common use seven thousand years ago.  Bane lets it dangle from his fingers, rocking a bit, and Keral squawks angrily, jumping forward.  Bane closes his fist securely around the handle and lowers his arm just before Keral can reach him, and Jame thinks idly about how she could be—anywhere but here, really.  Maybe somewhere with alcohol.

She’s never understood why Bane and Keral so frequently get assigned together.  Probably because Keral is uninventive but obsessively devoted to their Master, whereas Bane is almost human in his creativity but untrustworthy even by demonic standards.  There’s some kind of hope that they’ll rein each other in.

All she’s ever really noticed is that Bane enjoys driving Keral up the wall4, along with everyone else in the immediate vicinity.

“Here, m’lady snake,” Bane drawls, and holds the basket out, teetering, until Jame grabs it.

Jame flips up the lid, because curiosity has always been what Jame does best5, and almost drops it on the spot.

“Oh,” Jame says.  Her voice is a little faint, but even.  “It’s—that time, is it?”

“Finally.”  Keral stretches in the corner of her vision, a movement that’s entirely too liquid and disjointed for his mostly-human appearance, and from the sound of his voice, he’s smiling, smugly delighted in the way of a demon about to achieve some truly dire things.  “You’ve been honored by our Master, Jamethiel,” he says. 

“Very honored,” Jame says automatically without looking up from the contents of the basket.  The contents didn’t seem to be bothered by Bane’s irreverent handling of them, still sleeping soundly.  That did not make the contents any less alarming.

“About time, too, I was wasting away waiting for it,” Keral says, and idly bends his wrist back until his knuckles touch his forearm.  There’s a pop, then several sharp cracks, and Jame looks up. 

“Right,” Jame announces, an edge of manic brightness entering her voice as she snaps the lid of the basket closed.  “Right.  I’ll just go—do that.  About time.  Hail Satan.”

And she books the hastiest retreat she can manage, without actually running away.

* * *

Shortly thereafter, there is a shell game, but with babies.  Three fair-haired male babies—tidily code-named Baby A, Baby B, and the Antichrist, the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan and Lord of Darkness—to be precise.  The Monks of the Lugubrious Order of Saint Gorgo are a sweet bunch, if you ask Jame, but not always the most reliable at subtle communication.  This will later be blamed for an enormous amount of trouble. 

As far as Father Loogan, head of the order, knows, the Antichrist etc. is a scowling and squalling baby with ashy hair, delivered in a more literal than euphemistic sense to Caldane Caineron, American diplomatic attache, and his wife.  This baby—Baby B—is named Gorbel, and will be a terrible disappointment to quite a lot of people but also an excellent politician6.

Baby A, for the sake of the reader’s peace of mind, is adopted by a kind couple and grows up well out of events, with the kind of blithely silly nature that only blesses those who have narrowly missed growing up in politics.  We shall say that he is named Holly, and enjoys riding horses, climbing trees, and Not Being Involved In Politics.

The Antichrist, the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan and Lord of Darkness, is a beautiful and even-tempered baby, with pale blue eyes and hair so fair as to be very nearly white.

His single mother names him Kindrie.

* * *

Jame doesn’t call ahead, because she doesn’t believe in calling ahead on principle7, and also because her counterpart is terrible at answering his phone.  She just shows up, parks indiscriminately half onto the pavement, and starts hammering on the door, just above the _Closed_ sign.

No one answers, so Jame snaps and the lock sheepishly undoes itself. 

“I’m sorry, we’re closed,” Torisen says from the back room, without looking up from his latest discovery of what appears to be genuine ship’s maps circa the fifteenth century, if Jame isn’t mistaken.  His shop mostly stocks books—histories and first editions and other things that could make an academic weep if given half a chance—but she’s never seen him actually _turn down_ an artifact8. 

“I just delivered the Antichrist to a monastery and the world is going to end,” Jame announces as the door locks itself behind her.

The angel at the desk looks up, through the open door into the shop.  Tori and Jame have always looked alike—she thinks, vaguely, that they looked alike before the War, too, but can’t quite remember why—with inky black hair and silver eyes and very nearly the same bone structure.  He’s allowed his corporation to show its age a touch more, with grey threading his black hair, rather than Jame’s perpetual early twenties, but they could still be reflections in slightly rippled water. 

As such, she suddenly has an excellent idea of what she must have looked like, upon being handed the basket.

“Oh,” Tori says.

“Yeah.”

“Well,” Tori says, his hands moving slowly, apparently without his instruction, to slide the maps into a museum-grade envelope9.  “I suppose that’s that, then.  How long have we got?”

“Eleven years, give or take.”

“And then…”

“That’s right.”  Torisen nods, considering, and Jame collapses into the armchair across from him.  “Welcome to the End Times, angel.”

“Hm,” Torisen says, as if he’s still processing this.  “Drink?”

“ _Please_.”

* * *

Six hours and a quite extraordinary amount of alcohol later, an angel and a demon concoct a supremely questionable plan to save the world.

Spoiler alert: it does not work10.

 

 

 

 

1  After Creation.

2  There is no helping the fact that, apparently, Someone thinks that Jame is  _meant_ to be handed babies.

3  In fact Bane likes Earth _so_ much that he is strictly banned from being Hell’s representative there.

4  This is not a particular achievement: everyone from imps to archdemons enjoys driving Keral up the wall.

5  Jame has retained certain things from her initial professional dalliance with curiosity, including slit pupils, a streak of black scales from the nape of her neck all the way down her spine, and a fondness for sleeping in sunlight.  Really, she’s just glad she doesn’t hiss.

6  Being a politician will earn the erstwhile Baby B some fatherly approval at first.  Then he’ll go and become a liberal, whereupon Baby B will finish thoroughly disappointing everyone and be much happier for it.

7  Look, she’s still a _demon_.  Jame got a commendation for the invention of the call tree.  She appreciates phones.  She also appreciates the upper hand, and just showing up is better for that.

8  She has also never seen him sell one.

9  Jame is very, very sure that Torisen has been abusing his miraculous abilities for the sake of protecting his books.  There’s no other way those maps are surviving being handled.

10  It’s all right.  Someone else takes care of it.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm much too tired to put notes here, let alone link up the footnotes. I'm so sorry that I'm like this but it's a short fic, okay, like, very little, you can just scroll.
> 
> Look, I wrote an actual Good Kencyrath Fic last week, I dunno what you want from me.


End file.
